Natalie Jost

Although most of my product photos come as a result of several days of waiting for the right lighting, then an hour of shooting with my Canon EOS, the an hour or two of post-processing in Adobe Lightroom, I admit that a few of them come by way of my iPhone when I’m in a rush.

This is my process for getting those shots.

I use the built-in camera to snap my shots and then the rest is done with a single app. Snapseed is my Photoshop on my phone. There is a Photoshop app, but I’ve never had much success with it. Snapseed is simpler and works faster for the kinds of simple lighting changes I make day-to-day.

Here is a raw photo straight off the phone (before and after)

It’s not bad, but too dark. So I’ll open it in Snapseed and lighten it up using TUNE IMAGE. I set up the Brightness, and then for a little glow I lower the Ambiance.

You can also set the Contrast and Saturation here. And I may change the White Balance because mine can often turn out too orange if the sun is bright.

Better, but the corners are always a bit dark for me. I think the phone makes a natural vignette and I prefer whiter surroundings. So to lighten just the corners, I’ll use SELECTIVE ADJUST.

Click the (+) sign and then tap in the corner to place a “bubble”. You can use the two-finger zoom movement to enlarge the bubble. The red cloud shows the area that will be affected by your settings. Next, swipe left and right to set the brightness (up and down to change to contrast or saturation).

To repeat these settings on the other corner, simply tap the (B) and you’ll get a pop-up menu. Tap COPY, then tap the other corner to PASTE.

Now it looks as perfect as I can hope for from my phone.